Electronic Literature Lab

For Advanced Inquiry into Born Digital Media

  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Afterflash
    • Reconstructing Kanji Kus
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • Exhibitions
  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Afterflash
    • Reconstructing Kanji Kus
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • Exhibitions
  • News,  Updates

    Ruffle Preservation Report #2

    February 7, 2021 /

    This is second report about the work the lab is doing to preserve born-digital literature created with Adobe Flash.  Today the team (CMDC juniors Andrew Thompson and Arlo Ptolemy) finished implementing Ruffle on the works published in the Electronic Literature Collections, Volumes 1, 2 and 3. This week we will begin adding scholarly commentary to their intro pages to alert visitors about their accessibility.  Sadly, of the 235 works published in the three anthologies, only 16 could be preserved with Ruffle. Some others appear to function, but when compared to their original files (using the Pale Moon browser on a Windows computer) actually showed problems. The sound files in Maria Mencia’s “Birds…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Coping with Bits Kick Off

    June 21, 2018

    Why Collecting Is Important

    November 23, 2018

    Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North

    March 21, 2019
  • News,  Updates

    The Electronic Literature Repository

    December 11, 2020 /

    Last Tuesday Holly and I gave a presentation at the ELO Salon hosted by Deena Larsen about the Electronic Literature Repository. The lab has been managing the site since its creation and is now in the process of moving into phase 3 of its development.  The Repository is envisioned as the next generation exhibition and preservation space that will function as an open-access, online library/museum/archival site. Created in 2018-2019 with seed funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Repository currently holds 26 collections of 2207 pieces of born-digital literary art. The works held in the Repository include a wide variety of genres, such as hypertext novels, poetry, and essays;…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Inventorying Riding the Meridian

    February 8, 2019

    Announcing the Publication of Rebooting Electronic Literature!

    May 26, 2018

    The Art and Science of Hypertext

    August 8, 2018
  • Electronic Literature,  News,  Updates

    Traversal of Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling

    November 7, 2020 /

    Thursday, 11/12, 2020 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m. PST Live on YouTube: http://youtube.com/c/electronicliteraturelab #ELitLab Join us for a live YouTube event: A playthrough of Carolyn Guyer’s hypertext narrative Quibbling (1992, 1996). For the playthrough we’ll be using the 3.5-inch floppy disk version on a Macintosh Classic II, running System Software 7.1. Performing the work is the author Carolyn Guyer. Following her performance there will be a Q&A that includes the author, hypertext scholar and ELL Research Affiliate, Mariusz Pisarski, and Dene Grigar. Safety precautions due to COVID-19 means we will be using a combination of Zoom, YouTube, and OBS software to allow Guyer from New York State to remotely guide Grigar in…

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    Live Playthrough/Traversal/Performance of Robert DiChiara’s “A Sucker in Spades”

    September 3, 2020

    CELL Confab with Joe Tabbi and Davin Heckman

    May 6, 2018

    For the Love of the (Video) Game

    October 16, 2018
  • History,  News,  Updates

    11 FAQs about Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story

    June 29, 2020 /

      For the past month I have been preparing for the live group reading of Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story and the paper Richard Snyder and I are giving about hypertext at the ELO 2020 conference. My research led to: identifying every available manifestation of the work renumbering past editions and organizing them with the, heretofore, unidentified editions so that there is consistency throughout all of the manifestations of the novel versioning the novel according to changes to software so that it is easier for scholars to know what tech to use when accessing it tracking down more precise publication dates through email interviews, databases, and the Internet Archive…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body

    October 13, 2019

    Researching E-Lit and Its Printed Materials

    March 14, 2018

    Why a Lab Like ELL Is Needed for Digital Preservation and Archival Research

    November 12, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Launch of The Digital Review

    June 9, 2020 /

    Launch of The Digital Review Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:30 a.m.-1:30 a.m. At TDR’s Twitter site: https://twitter.com/tdrbark We are very excited to announce the launch of the new journal, The Digital Review (TDR), a sibling online publication of the electronic book review, founded and edited by CMDC faculty member, Will Luers, and supported by a research grant from Washington State University. TDR is an annual journal dedicated to the preservation and publication of innovative, born-digital essays. Each theme-based issue will offer a curated combination of commissioned work, submitted work and “rediscovered” work. It draws inspiration from journals, like Vectors (2005-2007), which commissioned  individual artist to create collaborative code, craft, and critical writing; Kairos, a long-established…

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    ELL’s Undergraduates Win Award

    April 12, 2019

    ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus

    April 6, 2019

    Hacking Electronic Literature Workshop

    February 24, 2018
  • News

    Treasures from The Dene Grigar Collection

    February 1, 2020 /

      The Electronic Literature Lab holds the collection of over 300 works electronic literature, video games, and interactive media, along with the hardware and peripherals with with to view the work, collected for the last 29 years by Dene Grigar. The collection highlights include all works of electronic literature published by Eastgate Systems, Inc.; posters, catalogs, and proceedings from many conferences and media art shows that featured electronic literature; books and other printed materials published to accompany born digital works. The items featured in this exhibit, however, are among the rarest in her collection because they represent one of the last, the only iteration of a work or unique work.…

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    Saving Flash Works: Report #1

    January 31, 2021

    Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body

    October 13, 2019

    Inventorying Riding the Meridian

    February 8, 2019
  • News,  Updates

    Moving Forward in 2020

    January 18, 2020 /

    2020 marks the 8th year that our lab has been on the WSUV campus. We kick off this new year with some changes to our personnel and many, many exciting initiatives. First, we hired recent graduate, Holly Slocum, as the lab’s official Project Manager. Holly served for close to two years as an Undergraduate Researcher in ELL overseeing numerous projects for us. We are very excited to have her expertise and passion in the lab. Staying with us this spring is Undergraduate Researcher Kathleen Zoller who led The Progressive Dinner Party Restored project last summer. She is a Junior in the Creative Media & Digital Culture (CMDC) program and our…

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    Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North

    March 21, 2019

    Literary Mobile Apps as the Next Frontier of Digital Preservation

    November 10, 2019

    Live Stream Traversal of Mary-Kim Arnold’s “Lust”

    May 8, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Curatorial Statement for “Tear Down the Wall” Exhibition at ACM Hypertext ’19

    August 11, 2019 /

    Below is my curatorial statement for the exhibition I am mounting at the ACM Hypertext ’19 conference at Hof University 17-20 September 2019. The archival website for the exhibition can be found here.  Tear Down the Wall: Hypertext and Participatory Narratives, held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext 2019 at Hof, Germany, borrows the theme from the conference––tear down the wall––that celebrates the 30thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The conference has also been envisioned by Conference Chair Claus Atzenbeck to “reunify different hypertext research directions and communities” (“About”). Born digital literature––what has been come to be called electronic literature, or e-lit––is one of these directions and communities…

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    Congratulating Our Graduating UG Researchers

    December 8, 2018

    Resetting the Table

    August 16, 2019

    Conserving Community: The trAce Online Writing Centre

    April 6, 2020
  • News

    E-Lit Scholar Astrid Ensslin Visits ELL

    July 28, 2019 /

    We are very excited about the arrival of e-lit scholar Astrid Ensslin to ELL, who will be doing research on the Eastgate Quarterly Reviews of Hypertext from August 14-28, 2019. The lab holds copies of all eight documented copies published by the company. Professor Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada) and the author of numerous books:  Approaches to Videogame Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2019), Small Screen Fictions (Paradoxa, 2018), Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and…

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    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018

    Richard Holeton’s Writings & Art about the 1970s Counterculture, Drugs, and Pigs

    January 11, 2019

    Celebrating Our Literary Heritage

    June 17, 2020
  • News

    ELL Welcomes Two ELO Fellows

    June 19, 2019 /

    The Electronic Literature Lab welcomes two Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Fellows in 2019-2020. They are Dr. Amy Spencer, a post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University in the UK, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill, a Canadian artist, curator, critic, and writer completing her doctorate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Both researchers will work under the mentorship of Dr. Dene Grigar to document works of electronic literature featured in the lab’s Traversal events in the organization’s scholarly ELD and in Wikipedia. Both are funded by Grigar in support of the lab. ELO Fellows is a new initiative by the Electronic Literature Organization aimed at supporting early career scholars interested in developing a…

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    ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus

    April 6, 2019

    Project Update

    June 15, 2019

    Live Stream Traversal of Bernstein and Sweeney’s Historical Hypertext, “The Election of 1912”

    October 13, 2020
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Upcoming Exhibit
afterflash: Treasures from the Flash Generation, Launch: Sunday, May 24, 2021.

Podcasts
Listen to Traversals by and Interviews of prominent e-lit artists and scholars on our Soundcloud playlist

2020-21 Traversal Schedule
Friday, September 11, 10-11:30 am PDT: Robert DiChiara, A Sucker in Spades (1988)

Thursday, October 15, 10-11:30: Bernstein and Sweeney, The Election of 1912 (1988)

Thursday, November 12, 10-11:30: Carolyn Guyer, Quibbling (1992)

Thursday, December 3, 10-11:30: Deena Larsen, Marble Springs (1993)

Thursday, January 21, 10-11:30: Michael Joyce, Twilight: A Symphony (1996)

Thursday, February 18, 10-11:30: TBA

Friday, March 26, 1-2:30pm PDT: Kathryn Cramer, In Small & Large Pieces (1994)

Thursday, April 22, 10-11:30: Richard Smyth, Genetis: A Rhizography (1996)

Thursday, May 13, 10-11:30: Rob Swigart, Down Time (2000)

2021 DHSI Course for E-Lit Scholars “Retro Media & Machines.” Co-taught by Dene Grigar & John Durno. Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.  University of Victoria. 7-11 June 2021.

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People

Director: Dr. Dene Grigar, PhD, Professor, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Associate Director: Nicholas Schiller, MLIS, Associate Professor, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Technical and Instructional Assistant: Greg Philbrook, B.A., Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Project Manager: Holly Slocum, B.A., Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Videographer: David Alonzo, MFA, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Undergraduate Researchers: Kathleen Zoller, Betsy Hanrahan, Andrew Thompson, Arlo Ptolemy, and Dave Sabrowsky ELO Fellow: Sean Braune (Canada) Research Affiliates: Mariusz Pisarski (Poland) and Astrid Ensslin (Norway)

This website was created by Katie Bowen, Mariah Gwin, Holly Slocum and Austin Fields. Madeleine Brookman produced the ELL logo. All custom icons were designed by Holly Slocum. Header graphic design by Katya Farinsky.

Copyright © 2018